Catalyst Quotes

“Seize Every Second of Your Life and Savor It”

“Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one’s own sunshine.”       (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“Everything we do that’s important is the result of conflict.   Not a conflict between us and the world–a conflict between us and ourselves.

We want to eat another dessert but we want to be healthy and skinny as well.  Who is we?  Who is the self in self control, and who is being controlled?

We want to stand up and make difference and we want to sit down and hide and be safe.   We want to help others and we want to keep more for ourselves.

It’s not a metaphor, it’s brain chemistry.   We don’t have one mind, we have competing interests, all duking it out.

This conflict, the conflict between I and me, is at the heart of being human.  One side sells the other.   Like all kinds of marketing, it’s far more effective if you know your audience.  You will do a better job of telling a story (to yourself) if you understand who you are marketing to.   In this case, I is marketing to me (and vice versa).   The marketing is going on in your head.     Successful people have discovered how to be better at self marketing.”       (Seth Godin)

“A wise man once sat in an audience and cracked a joke.   Everybody laughed like crazy.   After a moment, he cracked the same joke again.   This time, less people laughed.   He cracked the same joke again and again.   It came to a point when there was no laughter in the crowd, he smiled and said:

‘You can’t laugh at the same joke again and again, but why do you keep crying over the same thing over and over again?’”       (Unknown Author)

“You’ll seldom experience regret for anything that you’ve done.   It is what you haven’t done that will torment you.   The message, therefore, is clear.   Do it!   Develop an appreciation for the present moment.   Seize every second of your life and savor it.”      (Dr. Wayne Dyer)

“Letting Go and Moving On”

“To be ambitious for wealth, and yet always expecting to be poor; to be always doubting your ability to get what you long for, is like trying to reach east by travelling west.   There is no philosophy which will help a man to succeed when he is always doubting his ability to do so, and thus attracting failure.   No matter how hard you work for success, if your thought is saturated with the fear of failure, it will kill your efforts, neutralize your endeavors and make success impossible.”          (Charles Baudouin)

Letting go doesn’t mean giving up … it means moving on.   It is one of the hardest things a person can do.   Starting at birth, we grasp on to anything we can get our hands on, and hold on as if we will cease to exist when we let go.   We feel that letting go is giving up, quitting, and that as we all know is cowardly.   But as we grow older we are forced to change our way of thinking.   We are forced to realize that letting go means accepting things that cannot be.   It means maturing and moving on, no matter how hard you have to fight yourself to do so.”           (Unknown)

“Moving on takes courage, it takes the shedding of skin, so that the new self may come to light.   Moving on should not mean running away from commitment, responsibility and difficulties, we all must learn to endure in life, but rather a decision taken in sound mind, which we will not regret in the future.   Many a times moving on is most important, especially in terms of walking into the next moment and leaving behind the shadows of the past.   Every once a while, when life brings us hardships, one may get fired from a job, be facing a painful divorce or the loss of a loved one.   If you find yourself there, call within your being for strength, for light exists within us.   Get up and take that step.   Sometimes in life we got to move on!”           (Unknown)

“If I keep saying it, if I keep reaching out.   My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on.   To say ‘I can do this’ even when you know you can’t.”      (Stephen King, ‘Duma Key’)

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”     (Helen Keller)

“The Four Hardest Tasks on Earth”

“The four hardest tasks on earth are neither physical nor intellectual feats, but spiritual ones:  1)  to return love for hate;  2)  to include the excluded;  3)  to forgive without apology, and  4)  to be able to say ‘I was wrong.'”       (Anon)

“Sometimes, divine revelation simply means adjusting your brain to hear what your heart already knows.”       (Dan Brown)     

“Things don’t go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up.   They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be.”    (Samuel Johnson)

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.   To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.   To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”        (Henry David Thoreau)

“Live life fully while you’re here.   Experience everything.   Take care of yourself and your friends.   Have fun, be crazy, be weird.   Go out and screw up!   You’re going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process.   Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it.   Don’t try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.”        (Anthony Robbins)

“Wake Up”

“There has never been another you.   With no effort on your part you were born to be something very special and set apart.   What you are going to do in appreciation of that gift is a decision only you can make.”      (Dan Zadra)

“Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words.”      (Attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, but the origin of the quote is unknown)

“We must look for ways to be an active force in our own lives.   We must take charge of our own destinies, design a life of substance and truly begin to live our dreams.”      (Les Brown)

“Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become.   Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.”      (James Lane Allen)

“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”      (Paul Valery)

“Living Fearlessly; Making the Most of One’s Best”

“You don’t hear so much about people with a dream today.   It’s almost as if they’re afraid to discover what they’re individually capable of and would rather just follow the other fellow.   But all of us have more inside us that we believe possible.   We have to dream big and dare to fail to bring it out.”     (Norman Vaughan, explorer/mountain climber)

“Living fearlessly is not the same thing as never being afraid.   It’s good to be afraid occasionally.   Fear is a great teacher.   What’s not good is living in fear, allowing fear to dictate your choices, allowing fear to define who you are.   Living fearlessly means standing up to fear, taking its measure, refusing to let it shape and define your life.   Living fearlessly means taking risks, taking gambles, not playing it safe.   It means refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer when you are sure that the answer should have been ‘yes.”   It means refusing to settle for less than what is your due, what is yours by right, what is yours by the sweat of your labor and your effort.”     (Michael Ignatieff)

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply.   Willing is not enough; we must do.”      (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

“I’ve learned that only through focus can you do world-class things, no matter how capable you are.”      (Bill Gates)

“One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world  –  making the most of one’s best.”      (Harry Emerson Fosdick)

“Look Outside Your Heart, Dream; Look Inside, Awake”

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.   Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”      (Joseph Campbell)

“Is there a human being alive who is capable of getting to an airplane who doesn’t know how to buckle his seatbelt?   Given that we have 100% seatbelt understanding among the flying population, why do flight attendants repeat the instructions literally millions of times a year?

It’s stuck.

Change gets made by people who care, who have some sort of authority and are willing to take responsibility. Often, though, finding all three is tough, particularly when faced with the immovable object of the stuck organization.

One approach to getting unstuck is the clean sheet of paper.  Dictate that the speech before flight is going to change, that the menu will be redone, that the qualifications are going to start over, from zero.

Move your team, completely rewrite (and) throw out the standard script — by creating a vacuum, you give your team permission to invent.”         (Seth Godin)

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”      (Kahlil Gibran)

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart ….  Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”          (Carl Jung)

“Don’t Be Content Easily”

“…in all the woods and forests, God did not create a single leaf the same as any other …. People go against nature because they lack the courage to be different.”        (Paulo Coelho)

“Three daily reminders:   Have courage to say no.   Have the courage to face the truth.   Have the courage to do the right thing because it is right.”        (Mark Twain)

“Never doubt the capacity of the people you lead to accomplish whatever you dream for them.   It’s a principal that leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela have all embodied.  Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, ‘I have a dream – I wonder if people will be up to it?’”          (Benjamin Zander)

“Don’t be content easily.   Those who remain content easily remain small: small are their joys, small are their ecstasies, small are their silences, small is their being.   But there is no need! This smallness is your own imposition upon your freedom, upon your unlimited possibilities, upon your unlimited potential.”        (Osho)   

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”         (e.e. cummings)

“Trust the still, small voice that says, ‘This might work and I’ll try it.'”       (Diane Mariechild)

“You Need to Change Yourself”

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve:   the fear of failure.”     (Paulo Coehlo)

“Life is one big road with lots of signs.   So when you are riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind.   Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy.   Don’t bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality.   Wake Up and Live!”    (Bob Marley)

“To wallow is to bitterly complain “they are doing it to us again.”   To follow is to passively wait for “somebody to do something.”   To lead is to move forward with the conviction that “I am going to do something about this.”  If it is to be, it’s up to me.   Leading means taking initiative.   Leading is going and showing the way.  Leading uses persuasion rather than position of power.   Like the best navigators in the days of sailing ships, leading means figuring out how to capitalize on – or overcome – the conditions nature or life throws at us.”       (Jim Clemmer)

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves …  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you will not be able to live them.   And the point is, to live everything.   Live the questions now.   Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”        (Mainer Maria Rilke) 

“You don’t need to change the world; you need to change yourself.”      (Miguel Ruiz)

“Make a Difference in Your Life”

“When life knocks you down, try to land on your back.   Because if you can look up, you can get up.   Let your reason get you back up.”        (Les Brown )

“Nearly 100% of innovation … is inspired not by ‘market analysis’ but by people who are supremely pissed off at the way things are.   I happened to believe that only pissed-off people change the world, either in small ways or large ways.”       (Tom Peters)

“You are not here merely to make a living.   You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement.   You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”       (Woodrow T. Wilson)    

“Four Keys to Success

      1.      Show Up on Time

      2.      Do What You Say You Are Going To Do

      3.      Finish What You Start

      4.       Say Please and Thank You”      (Unknown Author)

“At some time in your life, you probably had someone believe in you when you didn’t believe in yourself.   They scripted you.   Did that make a difference in your life?   What if you were a positive scripter, an affirmer, of other people?”     (Stephen R. Covey, Daily Reflections for Highly Effective People)

“When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced.   Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.”      (Cherokee Expression)